Die and Stay Dead (32 page)

Beneath me, Smiley didn’t move. The revenant’s skull had broken open against a rock, damaging the brain enough that Reve Azrael couldn’t control it anymore. Now it was just a harmless dead body.

Still dizzy from the shock wave’s impact, I had trouble standing. I noticed Bethany and Isaac were having the same trouble, struggling to their feet and trying to shake it off. Unfortunately, the revenants were unaffected. Reve Azrael, Underwood, and the rest of them got back on their feet easily.

“The hell was that?” Isaac demanded.

Bethany pointed into the sky behind me. “Look!”

I turned. My jaw fell open.

Gabrielle flew through the air over Castle Clinton, moving toward us. Her leather coat flapped in the wind behind her. Her braided dreadlocks whipped in the air around her head like serpents. The air felt charged, electrified, and it was coming from her.

Hovering above us, she shouted, “Get out of my fiancé’s body, you bitch!”

She brought her arms together in front of her. The ground exploded under Reve Azrael’s feet, throwing her back several yards. She landed on her back, stunned. The other revenants froze as her connection to them was temporarily severed. I watched, astonished, as Gabrielle sent down another shock wave. The ground exploded again, hurling Reve Azrael through the air like a rag doll. When she crashed back to the ground, she didn’t move. The other revenants crumpled in limp piles. Gabrielle swooped down and landed.

“Gabrielle, what…?” I fumbled for the words. “How…?”

She turned to me, her eyes hard and angry. “Philip was right. I was weak and Reve Azrael knew it. She exploited it time and again. But no more. Now I’m strong. Now I’m ready for her.”

Isaac regarded her cautiously. “You’re carrying magic inside you.”

“You’re damn right I am,” she said. She opened and closed her hands into fists. “God, I’ve never felt so powerful. I feel like I could beat Philip in a fight now, if I wanted to. Where is he, anyway? I want to thank him for the good advice.”

Isaac didn’t answer. He just looked at her, half angry, half alarmed.

“Philip’s on a mission,” I said.

Gabrielle didn’t ask for details. She didn’t seem all that interested. She shrugged and said, “It’s just as well. We don’t need him. Not while I’m here. Not when I can do this.” She looked down at the revenant at her feet, a heavyset, middle-aged, male corpse still in the dark blue suit he’d been buried in. All she did was point at him, and his skull shattered, crumbling inward as if a sledgehammer had pulverized it.

Isaac watched her with horror. “Do you know what you’ve done to yourself, Gabrielle? How dangerous this is? You
know
what magic does when it gets inside people. It infects them. You’ve
seen
it. It’s what we’ve been fighting against this whole time.”

“You’re carrying magic and you’re not infected,” she said.

“I’m a mage.”

“And I’m a woman with nothing left to lose,” Gabrielle said. “If I get the infection, then that’s the price I’ll pay. If it means I get to put that bitch in the ground once and for all, it’ll be worth it.”

“Gabrielle—” Isaac started.

“Save it,” she said. “You can either help me, or you can get out of the way.”

She stalked over to Thornton’s corpse on the wet grass. She bent over him to take the Codex fragment out of his hand. She didn’t see his red-glowing eyes open. Reve Azrael had control of his body again. Before I could yell out a warning, Reve Azrael brought up the triangular fragment and drove its sharp, jagged point into Gabrielle’s side. It slipped under her rib cage like a dagger blade. The side of her shirt blossomed red. Blood splashed from the wound onto her dead fiancé’s chest, neck, and face, while Reve Azrael laughed and laughed.

I ran toward Gabrielle, but a revenant stepped in front of me and landed a cold, meaty right hook to my jaw. I fell on the wet grass and looked up. It was Underwood. He loomed over me, his knuckles raw where the brittle skin of his fist had connected with my face. I tried to get back up. He kicked me in the stomach, and I went down again. Behind Underwood, the other revenants swarmed Bethany and Isaac before they could help Gabrielle.

Reve Azrael grinned cruelly as she drove the sharp point of the Codex fragment deeper into Gabrielle’s side. Gabrielle cried out and throttled Reve Azrael, but of course it did no good. You couldn’t strangle a dead body. Her grip on Reve Azrael’s neck slipped as she grew weaker.

“It is time you joined your beloved in death,” Reve Azrael hissed. Gabrielle let out a soft moan and started to fall over. Reve Azrael yanked her back up and pulled her limp body close. “Know this, witch. After you die, I will wear your body like I wear his. I will make you do terrible things. To yourself. To those you loved. Perhaps I will start with your family.”

Gabrielle spat blood in Reve Azrael’s face. “You’re sick.”

“No,” Reve Azrael replied. “I
win
.”

With that, she tore the fragment out of Gabrielle. Its bloody point trailed an arc of red through the air. Gabrielle fell onto her side, bleeding into the wet grass. She shivered and curled up in the rain, hugging her midsection, her knees at her chest.

“No!” Bethany yelled. She struggled furiously against the revenants holding her back.

Reve Azrael stood, clutching the Codex fragment at her side. The heavy rain washed Gabrielle’s blood off the metal and into the dirt below. I got to my feet. This time, Underwood didn’t stop me. Watching Gabrielle lie in the grass, bleeding, dying, a white-hot rage built inside me.

“You had your chance, little fly,” Reve Azrael said. “The witch’s death is on your head, not mine. All their deaths will be.”

The revenants swarmed Bethany and Isaac until I couldn’t see them through all the dead flesh. I ran toward them, but Underwood grabbed me. He lifted me off my feet with unnatural strength and threw me to the ground. I hit the hard-packed earth. Pain shot through my back. I rolled over and stumbled to my feet. Underwood landed a hard punch across my face. I fell again.

“Where you going, Trent?” Underwood asked. The rotten hole in his cheek gave his voice an airy sibilance. “I thought this might be a good chance for you and me to catch up. It’ll be just like old times.”

I knew it was Reve Azrael speaking through the corpse, trying to trip me up, trying to keep me off guard. It was working. Underwood kicked me again, his boot striking me in the face. I flipped over and fell in the rain-soaked grass.

“I’ll start,” he said. “Did you know that when I burned Tomo and Big Joe alive, Tomo screamed like a woman? But not Big Joe. He was a tough soldier to the end. I needed them both to die, but of course neither of them wanted to. Tomo screamed and screamed as the flames surrounded them, but Big Joe just stared at me. I could see the hatred in his eyes as I watched him die. So much for loyalty, huh?”

I tasted copper on my tongue and spat on the ground. My saliva was tinged with blood. I rose to my feet.

“It’s so hard to find good help these days,” I said.

Underwood’s fist struck my face before I even saw it coming. For a dead man, he was quick. But then, that was the thing about revenants. They might be corpses, but they were fast and strong. The punch sent me reeling. I fell again.

I got back up, wobbly and off-balance. “You’re lucky they took my gun.”

“You should have remembered the Golden Rule,” Underwood said. “Never, ever lose your gun. You never know when—”

I silenced him with a sucker punch to the face. His nose broke under the impact, the cartilage snapping like a twig. There was no blood, of course. Underwood’s heart had stopped pumping a long time ago. But the force of the punch sent him staggering backward.

Damn, but that felt
good
. So good that I did it again, hitting him this time with a powerful haymaker that sent him reeling until he flopped back against a tree trunk. I punched him again. The rain had made his waxy skin slippery and loose. A patch of it sheared off under my knuckles. My fury numbed me to the pain as my fist scraped bone. Underwood’s face was ruined. His nose was a flattened turnip. Several teeth were missing. More of his skull had been revealed beneath his skin. My knuckles were raw and bleeding. I didn’t care.

Underwood laughed. His jaw hung crooked.

“What’s so funny?” I demanded.

“That you think this changes anything,” Underwood said. “That you think this matters.”

“It does to me,” I said. I hit him again. His cheek crumbled.

He laughed more. “I taught you well. You can take the criminal off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the—”

I hit him again, silencing him. His face was starting to look like hamburger mixed with jam.

He grinned at me through the wreckage of his features. “Don’t stop now. Embrace your true nature, little fly. Let it out!”

I punched him so hard his loose jaw came off. It hung on a strand of rotten flesh for a moment, and then the strand broke. The jawbone fell at his feet. Underwood’s black, withered tongue waggled beneath his upper teeth.

I continued pounding my fists into him. Even as his body began to sag against the tree trunk, I kept whaling on him. Every punch was a weight removed from the load on my shoulders, a load Underwood himself had put there. Every punch brought back the face of the dead little boy in the crack house. Every punch was the punch I should have thrown when Underwood told me the boy’s death didn’t matter. I wondered why I had ever been afraid of this man.

Underwood’s skull crumbled under my bleeding knuckles. After a while, I didn’t even feel the resistance of bone anymore. It was like putting my fists into pudding.

Hands gripped my shoulder and pulled me away. Trembling with rage, my blood pounding hot in my ears, I spun around, ready to keep fighting. Then I saw it was Bethany and Isaac standing behind me. I lowered my fists.

“It’s okay, Trent,” Bethany said gently. “It’s over.”

The grass was littered with destroyed revenants, their heads broken and cracked like eggs. Apparently, Bethany and Isaac had been busy while I was fighting Underwood. Catching my breath, I scanned the bodies. One was missing. The most important one.

“Where’s Reve Azrael?” I asked.

“She got away,” Isaac said. “Are you all right?”

I looked down at Underwood’s body slumped at the base of the tree. His face wasn’t recognizable anymore. The blood from my knuckles ran in red streams down my fingers.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m good.”

One of the revenants on the ground stirred, an elderly female corpse in a dirty, gingham dress. As she rose to her feet I saw the wound on her head was only superficial, not deep enough to sever Reve Azrael’s connection. The revenant lurched forward, groping for Isaac.

“Look out!” I shouted.

Isaac spun around, his palms crackling. He didn’t get a chance to cast his spell. Instead, the revenant burst apart in an explosion of dried meat, bone dust, and gingham. Behind it stood Gabrielle. She was hunched over, one hand clutching her wound. The entire right side of her shirt was slick with blood.

“Reve Azrael thinks she
wins
?” Gabrielle snarled. “No. Wrong again, bitch.”

We ran over to her, but she motioned for us to stay back. She pulled her hand away from her side. Her palm was wet with blood. She spoke an incantation, and a bright, green light spilled out of the wound. She winced in pain as the light filled the wound, then disappeared. Gabrielle lifted the side of her shirt to let the rain wash the blood away. Beneath it, she was completely healed, as if she hadn’t been stabbed at all. I blinked, amazed. I had never seen a healing spell like that before.

“That’s twice Reve Azrael tried to kill me,” Gabrielle said. “And twice she’s failed.”

Bethany put her hand on Gabrielle’s arm. “Are you okay now? How did you…?”

Gabrielle shrugged off Bethany’s hand. Bethany backed away, confused.

“I’m fine,” Gabrielle snapped. “But I’ll be even better once Reve Azrael is dead.”

“That makes two of us,” I agreed.

Bethany and Isaac both shot me a look, but I didn’t care. Maybe Gabrielle had gone off the rails, but she was right about this. It was time to put the rabid necromancer down. It was time to end this once and for all.

“Reve Azrael has the fragment,” I said. “But she couldn’t have gotten far, not yet. We can still find her.”

Isaac nodded. “Agreed. Fan out, search the park.”

We split up. I started down one of the long paths that ran parallel to the water. A hundred yards ahead of me, the path took a sharp turn onto an access road that ran north out of the park. A crowd rounded the corner of the access road and lumbered down the path toward me. They moved stiffly, and as they came closer I saw pale, discolored skin, dirty clothes, and bright red blood.

Shit. More revenants. I turned and ran back toward Castle Clinton. But it was too late. Revenants were flooding into the park everywhere. A small army of them proceeded down the central path past the battered bronze sphere. More came shambling down the winding side paths. There had to be a hundred of them, and they were all coming our way.

Twenty-Four

The revenants poured into the park, blocking the paths as they converged on us. The few remaining park visitors who’d braved the rainstorm stopped what they were doing and watched the revenants go by with puzzled expressions. What was wrong with them? Why weren’t they running? I looked around for Bethany, Isaac, and Gabrielle, but there was no time to regroup. I turned and bolted back the way I came, down the path toward the access road that led out of the park.

Unfortunately, that meant running right toward the revenants. They surged forward in a tide of dead, groping flesh. These revenants moved slowly—perhaps they weren’t as fresh as the last batch—but there were a hell of a lot of them. I didn’t see any way around them. I stopped and looked back quickly. The paths were filling up. The revenants ignored the gawkers in the park, lumbering past them, staying on target. And that target was us—or, more accurately, me. I was the one Reve Azrael wanted.

I ran toward the oncoming horde. Reve Azrael had taken my gun, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. I still had my fists. I would bash in as many rotting skulls as I needed to. But as I ran into the crowd, the revenants didn’t seem to take any notice of me. They marched right by me, moaning and growling like animals. I stopped, letting them file past. I’d never seen Reve Azrael’s revenants act this way. None of them tried to subdue me. None of them spoke. I turned in circles, watching as they flowed around me and continued on. Where the hell were they going?